"Being an American can be like playing at a cut-throat, madcap poker table, but it invites any to play who are willing to ante up and risk their all.

Victor Davis Hanson on European sobriety and globalization:

For all the cheap shots, the European public is worried about importing half their natural gas from Vladimir Putin, who now bullies Eastern Europeans, former Soviet republics, and dissidents well beyond his borders on the premise that his oil wealth and nukes ensure Europe can’t and won’t do anything.

Europeans know they won’t or can’t stop the Iranians from getting a nuke, but hope someone—that is, the United States—will. And from the Spanish flight from Iraq after the Madrid bombing, the spectacle of the British naval personnel in Iranian hands, and the continental paralysis after the Danish cartoons and other serial Islamic affronts to free expression, Europe knows that radical Islam is both dangerous and has little respect for either European moral authority or force of arms.

So it is they, not us, that are returning to sobriety in matters of the trans-Atlantic relationship, and they are doing this not because of affection for George Bush, but despite their anxiety about him. And that is good news, since it suggests the warming exists apart from personalities, and reminds us that if the so-called and much deprecated “West” were ever to act in unison (the former British Commonwealth, Japan, the US, and continental Europe), then radical Islam would simply have no chance against 8-900 million of the planet’s most productive, ingenious and democratic peoples.
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Globalization is mostly driven by the United States, whether defined by the spread of the English language, crass advertising, the Internet, American pop culture of rap, jeans and I-pods or worldwide businesses like Starbucks and MacDonald’s. A global sameness seems to trample traditional cultures and appeal to the masses worldwide despite lectures from their elites about the dangers of such American-induced contamination.

This influence of the United States is not attributable to strategic location like that enjoyed by a Germany or Iran. We don’t have vast oil reserves like a Saudi Arabia, or an enormous population such as India or China. Instead, it’s what we do rather than what we have that attracts others. Our radical Democratic culture of informality and inclusiveness results in an unusually tolerant and secure society, in which participation is open to all. Being an American can be like playing at a cut-throat, madcap poker table, but it invites any to play who are willing to ante up and risk their all.

We can see this dynamism not just by the flood of immigrants—America takes more of them than all industrialized countries combined—but by the nature of some of them. Those who are sometimes most publicly critical of the United States, privately seem to like us a great deal. Why else would the dictator of Pakistan, an Amal militia leader in Lebanon, or a Turkish Islamist Prime Minister entrust their families either to live in the United States or to go to school here? Only in America can a Palestinian criticize the Hamas leadership, a Turkish woman wear a scarf, or a female Saudi student date.

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[Europe] [United States] [China] [Russia] [Putin] [Iran] [Bush] [Hamas] [Saudi Arabia] [globalization] [security]